This invention relates to digital rights display and methods and apparatus for determining reuse rights for content to which multiple licenses and subscriptions apply. Works, or “content”, created by an author is generally subject to legal restrictions on reuse. For example, most content is protected by copyright. In order to conform to copyright law, content users often obtain content reuse licenses. A content reuse license is actually a “bundle” of rights, including rights to present the content in different formats, rights to reproduce the content in different formats, rights to produce derivative works, etc. Thus, depending on a particular reuse, a specific license to that reuse may have to be obtained.
Many organizations use content for a variety of purposes, including research and knowledge work. These organizations obtain that content through many channels, including purchasing content directly from publishers and purchasing content via subscriptions from subscription resellers. Subscriptions generally include some reuse rights that are conveyed to the subscriber. A given subscription service will generally try to offer a standard set of rights across its subscriptions, but large customers will often negotiate with the service to purchase additional rights. Thus, reuse rights may vary from subscription to subscription and the reuse rights available for a particular subscription may vary even across publications within that subscription. In addition, the reuse rights conveyed in these subscriptions often overlap with other rights and licenses purchased from license clearinghouses, or from other sources.
Many knowledge workers attempt to determine which rights are available for particular content before using that content in order to avoid infringing legitimate rights of rightsholders. However, at present, determining what reuse rights an organization has for any given publication is a time-consuming, manual procedure, generally requiring a librarian or legal counsel to review in advance of the use, all license agreements obtained from content providers and purchased from other sources which may pertain to the content and its reuse. The difficulty of this determination means that sometimes an organization will overspend to purchase rights for which it already has paid. Alternatively, knowledge workers may run the risk of infringing a reuse right for which they believe that the organization has a license, but which, in actuality, the organization does not.
One of the problems in determining which rights apply to a given publication is connecting the publication to one or more agreements that convey rights so that the correct agreement can be examined to determine what rights are available to an organization. One prior art method for performing this connection is to embed a special “tag” in the publication. When the publication is later opened, for example, for examination, the tag can be activated to direct the user to a specific location, such as a web site, where rights agreements are located. While this arrangement is effective, it requires each publication to contain the special tag. While this might be feasible for newly published publication, it would be prohibitive to re-publish older publications with the special tag. Thus, this system would not work with many existing publications.
Often a user trying to locate publication rights has only a publication universal resource locator or URL associated with a publication. The primary purpose of such a URL is to indicate where on a network, such as the Internet, a copy of the publication can be located. Thus, the URL typically does not directly identify the publication itself. However, many URLs contain information that is useful in identifying the publication. Unfortunately, there is no current standard URL configuration so that such useful information may be located in various places within the URL depending on the publisher or clearinghouse. Further, the useful information may be coded in various ways. Therefore, it may be difficult to extract the information from a particular URL.